The
Green Bag invites submissions for its
second micro-symposium, to be published in 2013 in the Green Bag and the Journal of
Law.

Theme:Professor Suzanna Sherry’s Why We Need
More Judicial Activism, which is available now on SSRN and sometime soon in
a festschrift for Professor Murray Dry of Middlebury College. Sherry’s article offers a compact yet wide-ranging
combination of the theoretical, the empirical, and the practical to support her
argument, which concludes,

“In
evaluating the appropriate role of the judiciary in a democracy, theory can
take us only so far. No theory can draw the line between too many and too few judicial
invalidations, nor specify parameters or constraints that produce a perfect
balance. We are left with the pragmatic task of making the best trade-off
between false negatives and false positives, and only an examination of the
actual consequences of judicial activism or restraint can inform that decision.
What such an examination teaches us is that too little judicial activism is
worse than too much. We most regret the cases in which the Supreme Court failed
to prevent popular majorities from making serious constitutional mistakes. If
we wish to avoid such regrets in the future, we should encourage more judicial
activism, not less.”

Invited
topics: Any theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help
our readers better understand Sherry’s argument – its correctness or
incorrectness, the good or bad uses to which it might be put, the consequences
if her views were to prevail or not, or anything else of the sort. Sherry will,
of course, have the last word, if she wants it. Some micro-symposium topics may
lend themselves readily to humorous submissions. We suspect this one does not.